Palestine and International Law: A Moral Perspective(3), by Usman Sarki,
“Finally condemned in a verdict of contemptuous dislike”-Joseph Conrad
We have witnessed the gradual erosion of the rule of law at the international level and the systematic dismantling of global institutional capacities to enforce the law when it comes to certain acts that are inimical to the maintenance of world peace and order. The great perpetrators of disorder today are not the unseen hands of negative forces and actors alone, but the disdain shown to the law by states that consider themselves powerful and beyond the call of accountability.
Hiding behind their parliaments, their powerful armed forces and state institutions, they rule the world from the pedestal of contemptuous disdain, arrogance and diktat that applies the law discriminately and with selected vision of humanity of some and not of others. They treat Ukraine and Israel as special entities more worthy of concern and protection than Palestine or the Islamic Republic of Iran, whether the cause of the later two is as sound and as justifiable as that of the former.
In the case of Palestine, invoking the protection of international law for its helpless people has become necessary not only because it is expedient, but also because it is right. In Palestine today, morality, reason and humanity are under attack and international law is being shattered into smithereens by the aggressive acts of Israel supported unconditionally by some of the Western countries and docilely by the rest of the world. The contrasts between the West’s reactions to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 and the actions of Israel in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian areas, imply that there are different moral and legal standards that are applicable to different peoples based on their religious and racial identities. Likewise, it implies that some states like Israel can be assumed to stand above and beyond the reach of the law of nations because of their peculiar characteristics and historical antecedents.
The world’s inability to stop the genocide in Gaza and prevent further suffering of the Palestinian people is a testimony to how we have lost our humanity and fallen victims to the dictates of force, blackmail and intimidation of unprecedented scale. The most glaring and painful truth is that international law has its limitations when Israel is involved and even where it is deemed to be in breach of laws of morality and juridical principles. An historical context must be provided to this series of articles because every incident has its antecedents and precursors in the past. A justification for the establishment of the Nuremberg international criminal tribunal in 1945 was the treatment of the Jews in Germany and other occupied nations by the Hitlerite Nazi regime.
The foundations of the charges levelled against those Nazi leaders that were arraigned before the tribunal largely consisted of conspiracies to do away with the Jewish population of Germany and other European territories under the control of the German Reich from 1933 to 1945. In its copious and extensive evidences that the prosecution submitted to the tribunal, one of the grounds that it established for the criminal complicity of the Nazi defendants was based on the section captioned “Adoption and publication of the Program for Persecution of Jews”. The prosecution provided extensive and incontrovertible evidence of the incidents of persecution of Jews that constituted war crimes and for which the guilty perpetrators were tried and punished.
Ultimately, the same principles and guidelines must be considered as applicable to the situation in Gaza today, where an exclusively Jewish population organised around the State of Israel is carrying out acts against the Palestinian people that are inimical to the tenets of international law and human morality. Actions cited by the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials included the arbitrary stripping of all Jews of German citizenship, hence rendering them stateless persons, the development of an ideological basis for the enactment of anti-Semitic laws and ordinances, the organised boycott of Jewish owned enterprises, the enactment of laws banning or barring Jews from holding any public offices or practising any professions, and the systematic extermination of the Jews in Germany and other conquered countries as state policy of the German Reich.
The actions of Israel in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories are also organised more or less around similar premises. Such actions today form a blot and an indelible stain on Israel’s conscience and that of the collection of nations that have supported it in all its actions without calling it to order or holding it to account. Indeed, unlike any other country in history, the State of Israel was given a carte blanche by the powers that be, to act imperiously and with total impunity against all nations of the world, with particular intensity of hate and fury reserved for the Palestinian people. It is this uncompromising stance against the world’s opinion and disdain for the rest of humanity that the world should condemn and pass a “verdict of contemptuous dislike” against Israel’s actions.
The fact that its leaders have been declared outside the pale of international law by the International Criminal Court, ICC, is a moral indictment of its world view and an emphatic repudiation of its aggressive and destructive policies. The world must not be made complicit to genocide and obliteration of Gaza. The world must find the courage and moral fortitude to speak against Israel’s actions in that helpless enclave to save its soul and reclaim those common values of humanity and empathy that are now being ground into dust and nothingness under the rubbles of Gaza and the endless despair of its innocent citizens. Gaza is already destroyed and gone forever, but its remaining population that is being systematically decimated must be saved from extermination by Israel.
Failure to act to save Gaza will be a condemnation of the entire human race by posterity just as it failed to save the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Gipsies and other nationalities from the blind and irrational rage and fury of the Nazi conspirators in Germany. History should inform and instruct us of the dangers inherent in failing to act when people are declared as subhumans and treated as such by powerful states and nations. International law must not be made redundant, ineffectual, subservient or valueless, by allowing its flouting to go unpunished. International law must not be “allowed to lag behind the moral sense of mankind” as forthrightly observed by the United States’ Chief of Counsel at the Nuremberg Tribunal trials.
We are invoking international law to protect the Palestinian people against Israeli aggression and crimes for the very reason that the United Kingdom’s Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunal stated thus: “Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of International Law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will in all countries may have “leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”
The unabated killings of Palestinians in Gaza even in supposedly safe and protected areas like food distribution centres, hospitals, schools, homes, places of worship etc, are not only a clear violation of international law, but also a disdain towards basic human feelings of compassion and moral revulsion towards acts of brutality. The Nuremberg tribunal has amply demonstrated the levels at which such brutalities were committed by the Nazi regime in Germany against defenseless people in cold and calculating manners, just as today Israel is doing in Gaza. The condoning of the blatant genocide in Gaza by Israel places the entire world in a moral abyss and dilemma of historical proportions. The world’s silent and helpless resignation towards the ongoing crimes represent a generational failure that can never be erased by any excuses or justifications and the future will be harsh on its judgement of our era.
It seems the world needs to be reminded of the words of wise and courageous individuals who conducted the trials of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg by recalling the worlds of one of them, Sir Harley Shawcross, the British Attorney-General and Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom, who stated thus: “No Law worthy of the name can permit itself to be reduced to an absurdity. Certainly the Great Powers responsible for this Charter have refused to allow it. They drew the inescapable consequences from the renunciation, prohibition, and condemnation of war which had become part of the law of Nations. They refused to reduce justice to impotence by subscribing to the outworn doctrines that the sovereign state can commit no crime and that no crime can be committed by individuals on its behalf. Their refusal so to stultify themselves has decisively shaped the law of this Tribunal”.
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“Finally condemned in a verdict of contemptuous dislike”-Joseph Conrad We have witnessed the gradual erosion of the rule of law at the international level and the systematic dismantling of global institutional capacities to enforce the law when it comes to certain acts that are inimical to the maintenance of world peace and order. The great perpetrators […]
The post Palestine and International Law: A Moral Perspective(3), by Usman Sarki appeared first on Vanguard News.
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